I'm an Audience Development Associate at Forbes, working to understand the hearts, minds and habits of people like you -- our users -- and then incorporate those insights into what we do. It's my first real job post-college but one that I'm passionate about, allowing me to continuously see the world in different ways. Last December I graduated with my master's degree from New York University's Studio 20 program where I studied innovation and adapting journalism to the web. Before that, I studied magazines and new media at the University of Georgia. I've been published in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, two metro-Atlanta area newspapers (The Rockdale Citizen and The Athens Banner-Herald), my college paper (The Red and Black), and luxury lifestyle magazine Haute Living. I've also done some social media work for Code and Theory, an interactive agency in SoHo, and CNN's documentary unit In America -- and I update @ForbesLife daily. Watch me as I write about work -- for work. If I'm not innovating, I'm not happy.

What The Watch You Wear To Work Says About You

As part of my job as an Audience Development Associate at Forbes, I update the @ForbesLife Twitter feed daily. If you haven’t noticed, the feed’s a little different from all of our other social feeds here at Forbes. That’s because it’s experimental. I have been given the freedom to test and try out new tactics to engage and communicate with our users online based on some thesis work I did for NYU during grad school. These tactics include asking our users questions, retweeting their answers, and using words such as “I” instead of “we”.

Last week, I asked some of our users on the feed to take a picture of their favorite watch and tweet it to us. This is part of a larger effort within my team to increase two-way communication and transparency between the company and the people that consume our content. We no longer want to talk at our audience (that’s no fun — for both me and you); we want to talk with them.

This is what I learned about our Forbes Life audience — people like you — from the photos I received:

You like nice watches — or, at least, the people who responded like nice watches. If you flip through the photo gallery you will see watches by Rolex, Burberry, Luminor, Michael Kors and Tag Heuer. This, for the most part, was not a surprise. Forbes Life is the luxury lifestyle extension of Forbes. If you’re following this brand, I’m going to assume you like or own some luxury goods, including nice watches — although that may not be the case for all of our followers.

You are mostly male — or, at least, the people who responded are mostly male. Out of all of the people that submitted a photo, only three were female.

You are willing to interact with us through photos submissions on Twitter. I received at least 15 photos of watches. This is good news! It means that some of you out there are interested enough and respect the brand enough to participate. For this, I thank you. It definitely made my day at work much, much more exciting.

You will only respond to photo requests that are compelling. Two days before I asked people to submit photos of their watch, I asked them to submit photos of their workspace. I figured that would be a good question to ask because it’s on brand (work and careers) and the picture would be easy to take, especially if you were reading the @ForbesLife Twitter feed from your desk — but I only received two responses. I suppose it wasn’t interesting enough. I can’t say that my desk at Forbes would elicit much emotion either. Not to mention, I’m still a little unsure whether or not many of you actually do work in an office. Many of the pictures taken midday on a Wednesday were outside, at home, or in natural light.

You will only respond to photo requests that are consistent with the brand. A few weeks prior to this, my team posted a photo challenge on the Forbes Facebook page in honor of our Celeb 100 list. We wanted people like you to submit photos of themselves imitating their favorite celebrity. We thought it would work because it’s fun and these are popular celebrities, all of them who made our list of the World’s Most Powerful. But many of you did not like it. We got zero photo submissions and many negative responses in the comments — people saying that Forbes was trying too hard, not trying enough, or at worst — trying to become something that we’re not. This is simply not true. It was an experiment to see what works for us and what doesn’t. This clearly does not. We will not try that one again. We’ve learned from it, but we will continue to experiment online. Experimentation, innovation and engaging with our users is important to us — and there is still much more to be done.

Asking for photos of watches on Twitter worked, but will it work on Facebook — or better yet, will it work if we ask on Forbes.com? This is a question that I’m interested in answering. Perhaps Facebook isn’t the best platform for asking our users to submit photos to us. It’s kind of confusing for contests — and we weren’t the most clear about our guidelines. Perhaps asking for photos on Forbes.com would be too “soft” for our general audience. I don’t know — but what I do know from the past two months updating @ForbesLife on a daily basis is that you want to talk to us, and we want to talk to you.

Help us figure this out. Why didn’t the Celeb 100 photo submission contest work on Facebook? What should I try next on @ForbesLife? What do you want to see on our social feeds?

In the meantime, follow @ForbesLife on Twitter.I’ll be updating the feed with some of your suggestions.

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